What happens to Bose when headphones become AI?

当耳机变成 AI，Bose 将何去何从？

Snyder on the company’s move into luxury audio, licensing the Bose brand, and what happens to great sound in the AI era. Snyder 谈论了公司向高端音频领域的转型、Bose 品牌的授权业务，以及在 AI 时代，卓越的音质将面临怎样的未来。

Today, I’m talking with Lila Snyder, who is the CEO of Bose. You certainly know Bose — it’s one of the most famous brands in all of consumer tech. The company started 60 years ago selling speakers to consumers, and its focus on research and development has led it to be a leader in both car audio and noise-canceling headphones. 今天，我采访了 Bose 的首席执行官 Lila Snyder。你一定很了解 Bose——它是消费电子领域最著名的品牌之一。该公司始于 60 年前，最初向消费者销售扬声器，其对研发的专注使其成为汽车音响和降噪耳机领域的领导者。

Lila was last on the show about four years ago, and since then she’s dramatically rearchitected the company. The focus on research is still there, but she’s sold off Bose Professional, acquired the high-end audio brands McIntosh Labs and Sonus faber, and, perhaps most importantly, started licensing all that core Bose technology to other companies. Lila 大约四年前曾参加过我们的节目，从那时起，她对公司进行了彻底的重构。公司依然专注于研发，但她出售了 Bose Professional 部门，收购了高端音频品牌 McIntosh Labs 和 Sonus faber，而且最重要的是，她开始将 Bose 的所有核心技术授权给其他公司。

That means that while you can still go buy a Bose soundbar or Bose headphones, the company is also turning into a B2B business, and you can get Bose technology in Skullcandy headphones and Epson projectors, among many other products. 这意味着，虽然你仍然可以购买 Bose 的条形音箱或耳机，但该公司也正在转型为一家 B2B 企业。你可以在 Skullcandy 耳机、爱普生投影仪以及许多其他产品中体验到 Bose 的技术。

That big change in the business comes with a big change in structure. Becoming a software company in addition to a product company comes with a whole new set of challenges, and Lila and I talked about how it’s all working out. 业务上的巨大变革伴随着组织架构的重大调整。在作为产品公司的基础上转型为软件公司，带来了一系列全新的挑战，我和 Lila 讨论了这一切的进展情况。

I also wanted to know if this is all a reaction to the potential rise of AI wearables — products that might end up looking a lot like headphones, and which need all kinds of audio processing to enable voice input. 我还想知道，这一切是否是对 AI 可穿戴设备潜在兴起的一种回应——这些产品最终可能看起来很像耳机，并且需要各种音频处理技术来实现语音输入。

Is Bose just trying to sell tech to a range of new companies that might disrupt headphones entirely? Or does Lila have a plan for a headphones market that was already disrupted when phone vendors like Apple and Samsung made their own products like AirPods and Galaxy Buds work better than the competition? Bose 是否只是试图将技术卖给一系列可能彻底颠覆耳机行业的新公司？还是说，Lila 对耳机市场有着自己的规划？毕竟，当苹果和三星等手机厂商推出的 AirPods 和 Galaxy Buds 在体验上超越竞争对手时，耳机市场早已被颠覆过一次了。

We got deep on this, and Lila was pretty open about the challenges and the opportunities here. As Decoder listeners know, I’m a huge audio nerd, so I loved every minute of this conversation. I hope you do too. 我们深入探讨了这个问题，Lila 对其中的挑战和机遇非常坦诚。正如《Decoder》的听众所知，我是一个超级音频发烧友，所以我非常享受这次谈话的每一分钟。希望你也会喜欢。

Okay: Bose CEO Lila Snyder. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Lila Snyder, you’re CEO of Bose. Welcome back to Decoder. 好的，Bose 首席执行官 Lila Snyder。让我们开始吧。本次采访经过了删减和润色，以确保篇幅和清晰度。Lila Snyder，你是 Bose 的首席执行官。欢迎回到《Decoder》。

Thank you so much. 非常感谢。

I am really excited to talk to you. It’s been four years since you were last on the show, which seems entirely too long. A lot of things have happened. Bose has bought some companies. You’ve sold some divisions. The idea of what headphones are is largely the same in one important way, but maybe going to be very different in another important way. How are you thinking about Bose today? 我非常期待与你交谈。距离你上次参加节目已经过去四年了，这感觉太久了。期间发生了很多事。Bose 收购了一些公司，也出售了一些部门。耳机在某种重要层面的定义基本没变，但在另一个重要层面可能即将发生巨大变化。你今天是如何看待 Bose 的？

We are having a lot of fun in what I would describe as our second chapter of the transformation of Bose since I joined. In some ways, many things are the same. We’re still making amazing products for our customers. We’re still excited about bringing that new technology forward in both our consumer business and our automotive business. But I would say two things fundamentally have changed as we’ve thought about growth for Bose for the future. 我们正在享受我所描述的“Bose 自我加入以来的第二次转型篇章”。在某些方面，很多事情依然如故。我们仍在为客户制造出色的产品。我们依然热衷于在消费业务和汽车业务中推进新技术。但我认为，在思考 Bose 未来增长时，有两件事发生了根本性的变化。

For 60 years, it was all Bose, and we’re now a multi-brand company. So as you said, we’ve made a couple of acquisitions. One of those was the McIntosh brand, a legendary 75-year-old audiophile brand that we absolutely love, and also Sonus faber, which is an Italian craftsmanship heritage brand that’s also been around for over 40 years. And so that brought us two things: from one brand to multiple brands, but also into the luxury audio space. 60 年来，我们只有 Bose 一个品牌，而现在我们是一家多品牌公司。正如你所说，我们进行了一些收购。其中之一是 McIntosh 品牌，这是一个我们非常钟爱的、拥有 75 年历史的传奇发烧音响品牌；另一个是 Sonus faber，这是一个拥有 40 多年历史的意大利工艺传承品牌。这为我们带来了两点变化：从单一品牌转向多品牌，同时也进入了高端音频领域。

The second change for us is that we’ve always been an amazing products company where we developed technology through research and a lot of development cycles, and all of that technology went into Bose products. And today what’s different is we’re still doing that, and we’ve added a technology business we call Audio Tech, where we’re taking that technology and starting to put it into other places. 第二个变化是，我们一直是一家出色的产品公司，通过研究和大量的开发周期来研发技术，并将所有这些技术应用于 Bose 产品中。而今天不同的是，我们依然在做这些，但我们增加了一个名为“音频技术”（Audio Tech）的业务部门，我们正在将这些技术应用到其他领域。

The big insight for us was that sound is really important. It’s getting more important, we think, given everything that’s going on in the world around us. There are so many products and devices out there that are using sound — whether that’s audio, voice, or even noise-canceling, where those things are incredibly relevant — but they’re not products that Bose would make. They’re not targeted at our customer set. But we really have a strong belief in bringing great audio to as many places as we can. 我们深刻认识到声音非常重要。考虑到我们周围世界正在发生的一切，我们认为声音变得越来越重要。市面上有太多的产品和设备在使用声音——无论是音频、语音还是降噪，这些功能都极其重要——但它们并不是 Bose 会制造的产品。它们不是针对我们的客户群的。但我们坚信，应该将卓越的音频体验带到尽可能多的地方。

The last time we talked, you were in the middle of becoming a more functional company. In particular, you had said the last step was the engineering organization, which is really the heart of Bose. It had been very divisional, very organized into products. You were centralizing that. Having an audio tech division that sells core technology feels like a very natural offshoot of that. “We’re going to have a big central engineering team. It’s going to feed into our products and other products,” and then you can abstract that a little bit and sell it to other people. Who are the customers for the audio tech division? 上次我们交谈时，你正处于将公司转型为更具职能化架构的过程中。特别是你提到最后一步是工程组织，这确实是 Bose 的核心。它过去非常部门化，按产品进行组织。你当时正在将其中心化。拥有一个销售核心技术的音频技术部门，感觉是这一举措非常自然的延伸。“我们将拥有一个庞大的中央工程团队。它将为我们的产品和其他产品提供支持”，然后你可以将其抽象化并卖给其他人。音频技术部门的客户是谁？

So it’s a B2B2C business, if you will. So our customers are large companies that are putting products into the market. So I’ll give you a couple of examples. We’ve partnered with Motorola on a series of products from earbuds to making the phone itself sound better. So Motorola is a good example. We’re partnered with Xreal. They’re making pretty awesome XR glasses, right? So that’s an experience where sound really matters a lot. We’ve had a lot of fun partnering with them. 这可以算作一种 B2B2C 业务。我们的客户是那些将产品推向市场的大型公司。我举几个例子。我们与摩托罗拉在多个产品系列上进行了合作，从耳塞到提升手机本身的音质。摩托罗拉就是一个很好的例子。我们还与 Xreal 合作。他们正在制造非常棒的 XR 眼镜，对吧？在那种体验中，声音非常重要。与他们合作我们感到非常愉快。